The stench can be detected on Capitol Hill in Washington. There, some Democratic congressional leaders who are vociferous in their public support for Gore reveal -- off the record and behind closed doors -- that they think the man should pack it in. Even among those who support Gore and are calling for patience, "there's a sense of despair," confides one senior Democratic Senate staffer. "Every day the scenario becomes less and less probable."

Even some of the earnest Democrats slaving away for Gore on the ground in Florida don't hold out much hope that this is going to end well for the vice president. The legal hurdles are too daunting. In order for Gore, who trails Bush by 537 votes in the certified tally, to end this in the White House, each one of the following dominoes must fall precisely right in the next 12 days:

1) Circuit Judge Sanders Sauls -- or, alternatively, the Florida Supreme Court -- must allow the following net votes for Gore: the 215 late manually recounted votes from Palm Beach County; the 157 votes that came from Miami-Dade County's partial manual recount; and 51 votes from Nassau County that showed up after the manual recount, though not on Election Night, and were not included in the certified state tally.

2) Sauls or the Florida Supreme Court must rule against the Palm Beach County canvassing board's decision to exclude the 3,000-odd "dimpled chad" ballots, and against the Miami-Dade canvassing board's decision not to evaluate the 10,750 "undercounted" or "no-vote" ballots that didn't register a presidential preference in the machine count and recount.

(The reason that scenario No. 2 alone will not be sufficient to put Gore over the top is that almost no one believes that the Florida Supreme Court, which has already ruled that acceptance of "dimpled chad" ballots is at the discretion of local canvassing boards, will direct Palm Beach to accept them. As for the Miami-Dade undercounted ballots, the Gore camp only expects to pick up 150 or so votes there.)

3) These ballots must contain enough votes for Gore -- combined with the 215, 157 and 51 votes gleaned in the sequence outlined above -- for him to overcome Bush's certified 537-vote margin of victory.

4) The U.S. Supreme Court must not rule that the Florida Supreme Court overstepped its bounds in extending the deadline for ballots to be received by the secretary of state's office.

5) The GOP-controlled Florida Legislature decides not to assign its own electors if the above hasn't been decided by Dec. 12, as seems likely. (Admittedly, if the Florida Legislature is forced to step in, the political situation will be explosive and the outcome even more impossible to predict than it is now.)

Other long-long-long shot alternatives: The Florida Supreme Court could rule that Palm Beach County's "butterfly ballot" was an illegal ballot and demand a revote. Or a judge could toss out all of Seminole County's 15,000 absentee ballots because the elections supervisor allowed GOP operatives to -- perhaps inappropriately -- fill in voter identification numbers on state GOP printed absentee ballot applications.

A tall order, no? I ask CBS legal analyst Andrew Cohen what the odds are that the above all happens. He demurs from predicting. "Our sound man has been right more often than I have," he says.

But despite the confidence of Gore attorney David Boies, it's not tough to sense the unlikelihood of the above falling into place in the desperate stink that permeates the Democratic effort here in the Panhandle.

The press conferences that trot out civil rights leaders making unsubstantiated allegations. Endless parades of "disenfranchised" victims of Nov. 7's typically less-than-perfect polling activities who reject the reality that shit happens, to a certain degree, in every election. Or the ridiculous conference-call photo-op among Gore, Lieberman, Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., and House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., on Monday afternoon -- one of the lamest bits of political theater this country has seen in quite some time.

Wednesday was no different. Almost every single Republican governor has been in Florida arguing Bush's case. Wednesday morning the Demos sent four of their own before the media. (One of whom -- Pedro Rosello of Puerto Rico -- isn't even from a state.) They wander into the state Senate hearing room to tell the media that they, too, support Gore's latest legal gambit.

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